Elliptical Meanderings of an Obsessed Tone Geek

I experienced something of an "Awakening" recently, which I believe this was triggered by a gig I had just played. Although it was not an especially unique show, I came away from it with the distinct feeling that not only had my playing seem to have improved substantially, but also my style had, well, progressed forward and seemed to draw more on my early influences at the same time. The feeling that I have somehow been "recharged" has been increasing in intensity ever since. Lately I have been engaged in strange activities like changing the strings on my guitar (they were so old that as I loosened the tuning gears, the strings just broke off!) and practicing standing up (I had to raise my guitar strap until my wrist learned to bend again). Well, at this point I have to admit that many moons had passed since the last time I had set foot on stage for more than a quick jam. And even though I do play just about every day testing amps, there’s a big difference between locking yourself up in a cubbyhole, stewing in your own juices and putting your ass on the line in front of an audience. I was looking forward to a challenge.

In preparation, I decided to keep the rig I would use for the show as simple as possible to avoid being distracted by too many toys. For my main guitar I used a Musicman EVH, one knob, one switch (I left the whammy bar in the case). I also brought a stock Tele as a back-up. The amp was a Pittbull Fifty/ST head with a 2X12 closed back cab. The ST had just recently been reintroduced with some new features and I was anxious to give it a live test run. Also, it is a pretty straight ahead two channel amp (Clean channel, Dirty channel, Reverb, F/X Loop) which would force me to concentrate more on playing, less on tweaking. In the cabinet, I installed two Pittbull P50E (50 watt) 12s. I have a tendency to play too loud (not to me!), so I wanted the speakers to give up easily just in case I got carried away. The rest of the setup included the footswitch for the amp and a TC chorus pedal (in the loop and sitting on top of the amp, "out of reach, out of mind").

Well, the gig went pretty smoothly. I was so nervous at first that my stomach hurt. I am beginning to understand that part of my obsession with gear is probably related to dealing with stage fright. Later in the set I got my stage legs back and in the end I came away feeling pretty damn good about the whole thing. The guitar sounded great, felt comfortable and stayed in tune very well. I switched to the Tele for a couple of songs if just for having gone to the effort of bringing it (OK, maybe I felt a bit obliged to give it some time in the spotlight. Guitars are people too, ya know?). The amp performed well past my expectations, and overall I received a lot a compliments on my sound and performance. The most interesting thing though was this lingering "Buzz" that has persisted weeks later that has inspired me to go back and analyze everything that I have been doing with guitars and amps over that past few years. I decided to act on this inspiration, going through every link in the chain, step by step.

The Deconstruction

I started with the guitar. I seem to be drawn to the most simplistic instruments. Telecaster, Esquire, Les Paul Jr., the EVH. A recent phone conversation with a friend helped me put my finger on it. Guitars as simple and straight ahead as the Esquire and the Jr., represent a challenge: "What are you going to do with this? Make something happen! Express musical and emotional range and all you have to work with is this here little volume knob!" I am attracted to the idea that my guitar would draw a line in the sand and dare me to cross it. So I pulled out my old beat up Esquire and cleaned it up, put on new strings and tightened up the output jack (still loose from who knows when was the last time I gigged with it). I started fooling around on it and before I knew it, I had been banging away with unbelievable intensity for over three hours! Fingers bleeding, nails cracked and jagged…Wow. I decided to stick with this guitar for the remainder of my Tone Catharsis Experiment.

Next came the amplifier. Every year or so, I like to pull out some of the relics in the storage locker and see how the VHT designs stack up against these venerable old road warriors: A Blackface 4X10 Concert Amp, a 1970 100 watt Super Lead, an early 70s Hiwatt 50, a friends AC30. Each time I plugged into one of these, I was immediately transported back in time. Not just to the moment, but also to the seeds of my discontent about sounds and what I was or wasn’t getting that I was trying to get. Considering the circumstances at the time, the clarity and detail of my recollections was a bit of a shock. "The low end is too loose with this one, but the mids honk too much with that one. I’m getting sustain for solos but no bite on rhythms. This one needs an overdrive pedal to get the gain but then it’s noisy and the dynamics are gone. This one gets a great balance with no stompboxes but the sound gets lost live. Nice tone but doesn’t exactly nail the sound I hear in my head. This one sounds better with a humbucker guitar, but I like the P90 Jr. sound better". I was pleased to see how well the amps that I had designed solved the problems I had encountered over the years. This is even a greater source of satisfaction for me now considering the current obsession with vintage amps, re-creations and re-issues. The vintage amp phenomenon seems to be rooted in a similar kind of deconstruction process that I had just found myself caught up in. My feeling is that this has to be a temporary condition as musicians by nature must grow and evolve musically or risk stagnation. Just as musical trends evolve and recycle, so do musicians need to revisit their sonic roots from time to time which includes spending quality time with the old standbys. But, I digress. I have always been very intrigued with the unencumbered interaction between the guitar and amplifier. So, just to make sure I left no stone unturned, I played around with guitar cords a bit and sure enough, I ended up right back with the 15 ft. Whirlwind cord that I have been testing amps with for the better part of 10 years. I can’t say enough about the importance of the "sound" of guitar cords, but I have decided to save that subject for another time and place. As far as the guitar to amp signal path is concerned, I have long been convinced that the compromise of the guitar signal caused by pedals outweighed their benefits. I also felt that if I had the right amplifier, I would have little or no reason to rely on stompboxes. The current popularity of pedals certainly demonstrates how far out of sync my thinking is compared to the mainstream. Then again, I believe the stompbox craze is partly just a different expression of the trial and error process that I frequently go through in my quest to "get it right" and partly a "me too" jumping on of the stombox marketing bandwagon. Admittedly, my view is a bit biased. I design amplifiers for me to a fair degree and in the long run I believe that there are a growing number of players out there who stand to benefit from my trials and errors. So I was especially happy to discover that I could still allow myself to take an objective look at the amplifiers that played a part in my evolution as a player and designer and feel confident that VHT amplifiers hold their own in such esteemed company . I decided that I had explored this avenue to exhaustion and now it was time to move on to the last most essential and frequently overlooked link in the chain.

The most important things to me in a speaker system are 1) cabinet behavior, 2) speaker behavior and power handling capacity, 3) harmonic balance across the frequency spectrum and 4) interaction between the speaker system and the amplifier. Quality materials and solid construction are of course extremely important, but to me these will come as something of a natural consequence of the process of designing a good sounding and well built cabinet. In going back to my desire to find out how VHT cabinets "measure up", I again began hauling out the old standard bearers. Naturally no evaluation of this nature is possible without the presence of a good old Marshall 4X12 loaded with original Greenbacks. That this is a familiar reference point for masses of players and many other amplifier manufacturers is without question. Hooking up the Pittbull 50/ST and Forty-Five to this cab was an eye opener. I haven’t compared the sound of VHT cabs to this one for quite some time. Players frequently compliment us on the warmth , bottom end and definition of our cabs so I tried to make a point of keeping an open mind and an objective ear. The tonal signature of the Marshall cab is unmistakable. This particular one has always been my favorite of all of the variations I have heard. But, I have always searched for ways to get that nice speaker distortion sound with a bit more clarity and a little greater capacity to handle the bottom end. That’s not a terribly tall order in designing a 4X12 cab and a speaker to match, but the fun part is that I was comparing this one to the aforementioned 2X12 P50 cab! The overall volume (SPL) was pretty much the same. An interesting occurrence considering that we were comparing 2 speakers to 4. I then took the opportunity to listen to several of the other VHT cabs, a 1X12 ported cab, a 2X12 open back, and the 12X210 open back.. After satisfying myself that the quality of the sound and the VHT tone character were present and consistent throughout the range, I concluded that the 2x12 that I had started with would be a good benchmark. The P50E was originally conceived as an economical speaker for use in our 4X12 cabs. In the design process however, it just began to take on a life of its own and we kept massaging it into what has turned out to be a very expressive and musical sounding speaker. For this particular exercise, the P50E just seemed to compliment the Esquire personality the best. Plucking the bottom strings produced a round, open bounce, high string bends induced a sweet singing speaker distortion and strumming an open E chord had a crisp chimey ring. In addition, the onset of power amp distortion in the ST coincided nicely with the onset of speaker overload. The thing that I dearly love about the Esquire is something that I have attempted, usually unsuccessfully to describe to others on several occasions. When that guitar is plugged into the right combination of amp and speaker, the result is absolutely explosive. The nearest sensation I can compare it to is the sound of cats fighting in the alley outside your open bedroom window at 4 AM. My old bass player once described this sound as "really threatening". I think of it as a kind of "angry sweetness with wood". With the Fifty/ST+212-P50E combination, I could literally feel everything fall into place. Once I had this combination dialed in and cooking, I felt that I could walk into any situation with it and make it work with whatever music was being played.

Rekindling the fire

Why had I let my guitars fall into such a state of neglect over the past several years? Primarily because I have had so few opportunities to play out. Also, my main test guitar is something of an errant stepchild. Every amp shop has one (or should). You know the one. Kind of pitiful looking but easy to get comfortable with. Sounds good but not great. Gets knocked over a lot. The errant stepchild guitar is a hodgepodge of miscellaneous parts thrown together with no particular regard for the outcome. It is enough that it works and its main strength is its mediocrity. If the amp sounds good with this one, it’ll sound good with anything. It’s important to have a consistent and stable testing environment to insure that the test results are reliable. That means it’s possible to get a little nervous about changing strings because of how that might affect test results. It didn’t necessarily occur to me that this mindset might be spilling over onto my other guitars. Preparing myself for the gig was the first step in breaking me out of that rut. Wiping down your guitar and changing the strings creates anticipation. It gets the buzz going. The next step was getting an amp together for me to use. No joke! Most people I speak to go all wide eyed on me when I tell them I don’t have my own personal VHT amp. "You can have your pick of any VHT!" Well, yes and no. Ultimately, the amplifiers we build are meant to venture out into the world and find new homes. This has got to be the great irony of being an amplifier designer. Just when I think "I’m going to take this one home and shoot anyone who lays a hand on it", something comes up or someone needs a loaner or a demo or "sorry, that one has to go to [your city here]". Having finally solved that little detail, I was ready to start working out my parts on the tape. As fate would have it the last two days of the week were so busy at work that I wasn’t able to get to the tape until two hours before my one and only rehearsal. Fortunately the songs were straight ahead and I had everything down and all of my notes ready in time. It was two days before the show and it was the first time I had met half of the band. Drummer looking at amp…"That looks new." "Er, uh yeah, (muttering under my breath) just finished it last night." "What?!?!" Whole room starts cracking up. Leader of band nervously rolling his eyes. Needless to say everything went off as planned and I pretty much sailed through the gig with only a few minor clunkers.

The most amazing thing about it though was that unmistakable and constant sensation that it wasn’t me playing. I thought I was having an out of body experience. It just seemed to me that a lot of the stuff I was playing was bubbling to the surface that either wasn’t there before or I had just never let it out before. As a result of that experience, I started doing some really unusual things. Like hanging out at music stores more, trying different kinds of strings, taking my guitar to the local repair shop to (gulp) get it set up and intonated!

Ready to Rock

Having gotten my batteries recharged and gone through my semi-annual evaluation ritual, I now find myself spending a couple of hours after closing a couple of days a week, pummeling the daylights out of my Esquire/ST rig. I have tried many combinations of amps and cabs together with a Strat and various pickup combinations to get at some essential Hendrix and SRV voicings if for no other reason than to say "I can". But to have somebody come into my test room and tell me I nailed it when I wasn’t even trying, not even playing a Strat or any other obvious guitar/amp combination was something of a charge to say the least. The SRV sound has a lot of sparkle and detail. The ST set to Class A/B mode captured this quite well. Hendrix had a very bouncy open voicing but softer on the top and bottom. Switching the amp to Class A helped me steer the amp in that direction. Hendrix probably rarely if ever recorded with a Class A amp. It just goes to reinforce my philosophy that if you’re looking to emulate a particular sound, you have to keep in mind that you are not that person. The physical structure of your hands play a decisive role in creating "tone". Duplicating your heroes rig is no guarantee that you will be able to duplicate their tone.

I have a couple of opportunities to play again coming up soon and I feel like a bottle rocket just waiting for someone to light the fuse. After I get a few more gigs under my belt I plan to get this sound down on tape and make it accessible on the website.

Stay Tuned…